I have a webserver that uses apache. When I do a ls -l on /var/www/project1/public_html and /var/www/project2/public_html, I see that they are owned by projectuser1 and projectuser2 respectively.

On some of other servers I've looked at, both /var/www/project1/public_html and /var/www/project2/public_html are owned by only www-data. How would I go about changing these ownerships to projectuser1 and projectuser2 such that these new users can login to their areas and manage their own websites?

I created a user projectuser1 then did a chown -R projectuser1 /var/www/project1, but any time projectuser1 adds a new file to the directory, Apache gives me a Permission Error. If do a chown -R www-data /var/www/project1, then everything works again.

Ultimately, I want apache to serve the /var/www/project1 directory with projectuser1 owning it.